Encouragement

So, my baby is finally crawling! I say "finally" because he took his time, waiting until he was close to 10 months old. We did everything we could think of to encourage him, but as I've written about before, we just had to wait until he was ready. And he was definitely ready. He went from being pretty much stationary, not even scooting, to full-on, on-all-fours crawling, in about 3 days. And now I'm wondering what I was so excited about. Moms know that once your baby starts crawling, it's a whole new world. Gone are the days when you could leave your baby sitting on the floor with some toys for a couple of minutes while you went and...

The holiday season is officially among us. And with it comes lots of traveling.  This week, we’ll be featuring posts all about making traveling with our kiddos safe and bearable, maybe even fun! I joined the Baton Rouge Carseat Safety Facebook group late last year when my son needed a new car seat. A friend of mine recommended it to me and suggested that I post a question of what kind of car seat to buy and give my son's height, weight, budget, type of car, and if anyone else rides in the back with him. Within minutes, I had a couple great recommendations from the group's owner and child passenger safety technician, Amy Waters. I took the information and ran with it...

The holiday season is officially among us. And with it comes lots of traveling.  This week, we'll be featuring posts all about making traveling with our kiddos safe and bearable, maybe even fun! I know that we have all been there: you get in the car, back out of the driveway, and immediately your kids start fighting, or whining, or screaming for something that dropped on the floor.  For my kids, it's that they always want to watch a movie.  And I'm all for the convenience that comes with DVD players in vehicles, but I really try to use that for long-distance driving only.  In my opinion, my kids watch enough TV as it is.  Furthermore, when I was a...

Childbirth and change. The two words go hand in hand, do they not? The moment you get pregnant, people start reminding you that "everything's about to change". Some are kind enough to add "for the better" on the end of the popular phrase. And you know it's true, it has to be - you're literally about to add an entire new person into your life and home and routine. There are the obvious things {your nights, your time}, but when we brought our little bundle of joy home, the age old adage that so many had repeated to me while I was growing her was abundantly true. Everything had changed. My usually very clean and neat house can become a...

There are so many things I wish I had known about motherhood before I had children, but I guess it's just true that you can never fully grasp it all until you are there. If there was one thing I wasn't prepared for, it was everything my kids would teach me about myself. Not just how many hours I can go without sleep, how "hangry" I can get, and the absolute longest I can go while listening to a screeching toddler from the confines of a carseat before wanting to pull all of my hair out, but who I am. Like, who I really really am on my deepest level. It started more when my daughter was born, seeing it all...